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against the side.
    “There you go, Jimmy,” said Taff Evans. “Up on your pegs, eh. Bob’s your uncle.”
    When he saw that I was safe, Mr. Oates hurried away. I could hear the ponies struggling in the dark space inside the ship, screaming as they bashed against the wood.
    At the stern stood Captain Scott, as ragged as a scarecrow. He steered to the east with the wind behind him. To me, the ship seemed frightened. It ran at a crazy speed, hurtling through the waves. Captain Scott didn’t seem worried. But I thought the ship had bolted and was running just for the sake of running.

The
Terra Nova
is sinking. Captain Scott keeps her running east, hoping the storm will pass. He relies on the steam engine to pump water from the hull of the old whaler
.
    Down below, everything is wet. Seawater drips through the coal bunkers, washing the dust down to the bilge. In the bottom of the ship, it sloshes back and forth, mixing with lubricating oil spilled from the engine. Bit by bit it’s drawn into the pumps, where it turns to a black and tarry mass. It clogs the valves; it chokes the pumps
.
    In the engine room, water rises quickly over the gratings. The engine is shut down to save the boilers
.
    The
Terra Nova
is heavy in the water now, and the waves roll right over the deck. Captain Scott, standing at the stern, can see nothing of his ship but the masts. Two ponies are battered to death in their stalls. A dog is carried overboard. Ten tons of coal are lost, along with sixty-five gallons of gasoline meant to power the motor sledges
.
    Scott puts his scientists to work with buckets, lifting water from the bilge. His sailors chop though a bulkhead to reach the clogged pumps
.
    Scientists with buckets, and sailors with axes, manage to save the old ship. The storm passes and Scott turns south again
.

    Amundsen and his
Fram
are far to the west, trailing Scott by thousands of miles. He has just passed the Kerguelen Islands, halfway between Africa and Australia. He had hoped to visit the Norwegian whaling station there, but bad weather kept him at sea. Now the winds are fair, and he’s bowling along toward Antarctica. He has four thousand miles to go
.
    His ship is covered with dogs. He left Norway with ninety-seven, but puppies have been born at sea, and there are now considerably more. They run loose, not minding the gales but hating the rain
.

C HAPTER T HREE
    I didn’t know that two ponies had died until I saw their bodies being hoisted through the skylight.
    It was awful to see them so slack and limp, as lifeless as the bags of coal. A group of sailors dragged the bodies across the deck, waited until the ship rolled heavily, then heaved them over the rail. Poor Mr. Oates looked brokenhearted.
    I saw him leaning against the rigging, staring into the sea, and I wished I could go and prop him up, as he had held me through the storm. I knew what he was thinking, that it had not been fair to the ponies to drag them half a world away from forest and field, to see them die in a ship on the ocean. I imagined that he was afraid the ponies hated him for it.
    All the men stopped work for a moment as the dead poniesplunged into the sea. Spray flew up and splattered on Mr. Oates’s boots. He looked horrified by that. Then the sailors went back to work, but Mr. Oates stayed where he was. He got out his pipe and lit it, and turned up his face to the sky.
    Compared to me, he was small and frail. But at that instant, he seemed as strong as an ox, and I knew I would follow him to the end of the earth if that was where he cared to lead me.

    South, south, forever to the south, the ship moved along over rounded waves, to wherever it was we were going.
    We saw the first iceberg of the voyage. It was far to the west, hard for me to see at all. The men were all excited, shouting at each other to look. I leaned to the right and peered between two rows of packing crates. I saw the iceberg far away as sunlight glowed on its top. It looked to me like a